"Speaking of Horace," continued the Doctor, in a voice slightly husky
with feeling, "he gives us glowing descriptions of his winter circles of
friends, where mirth and wine, music and beauty, charm away the hours,
and of summer-day recreations beneath the vine-wedded elms of the Tiber
or on the breezy slopes of Soracte; yet I seldom read them without a
feeling of sadness. A low wail of inappeasable sorrow, an undertone of
dirges, mingles with his gay melodies. His immediate horizon is bright
with sunshine; but beyond is a land of darkness, the light whereof is
darkness. It is walled about by the everlasting night. The skeleton
sits at his table; a shadow of the inevitable terror rests upon all his
pleasant pictures. He was without God in the world; he had no clear
abiding hope of a life beyond that which was hastening to a close. Eat
and drink, he tells us; enjoy present health and competence; alleviate
present evils, or forget them, in social intercourse, in wine, music,
and sensual indulgence; for to-morrow we must die. Death was in his
view no mere change of condition and relation; it was the black end of
all. It is evident that he placed no reliance on the mythology of his
time, and that he regarded the fables of the Elysian Fields and their
dim and wandering ghosts simply in the light of convenient poetic
fictions for illustration and imagery. Nothing can, in my view, be
sadder than his attempts at consolation for the loss of friends.
Witness his Ode to Virgil on the death of Quintilius. He tells his
illustrious friend simply that his calamity is without hope,
irretrievable and eternal; that it is idle to implore the gods to
restore the dead; and that, although his lyre may be more sweet than
that of Orpheus, he cannot reanimate the shadow of his friend nor
persuade 'the ghost-compelling god' to unbar the gates of death. He
urges patience as the sole resource. He alludes not unfrequently to his
own death in the same despairing tone. In the Ode to Torquatus,--one of